Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that.

While browsing some of my favorite sites looking for quirks in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) that I needed to be aware of for Web design, I came across one of the most helpful design tools I've seen in a long time. Caleb Gilbert recommended at Drupal.org a site called Browsershots. His recommendation was prompted on the need for non-IE7 users such as Mac users to actually see what their sites would look like in IE7.

Lorelle VanFossen makes some great observations in his post with regards to which browser, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, work with Wordpress. Internet Explorer 7 was just released for Windows XP last week. If everything sticks to schedule, Firefox 2 will likely be out sometime this week.

Ms. VanFossen's article doesn't say it, but IE7 has been noticed to work better with AJAX type sites than IE6. Of course the original question though is how does IE7 compare with Firefox when running Wordpress?

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Alexa, a Web search and site statistics company, had wrongly merged CMS Report with a couple other unrelated sites under uly.net. At the time my traffic rank stood at 218,200. Luckily, Alexa has a procedure that lets you contact them so they can separate your site from the other sites.

The folks at Serendipity have released version 1.0.2 to address cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities "on the admin backend which could happen if registered authors can be tricked into following a specially crafted URL." The 1.1 Beta 5 also contains this fix along with the following new changes since Beta 1:

As we reported earlier this month, a new version of Joomla! is near completion. The development team has released Joomla! 1.5 beta to allow for testing, identify bugs, and offer feedback to the developers. The following is an excerpt from an official announcement at joomla.org:

Google Buys CMSReport.com. That's at least what I would have liked this week's headlines to read. Instead, everyone in the business world is still scratching their head and wondering what to make of the Google and YouTube deal. Are we about to enter real growth and value in tech or are we about to face a Dot-Net Bubble 2.0? I don't have all the answers, but it looks like everyone is watching. BusinessWeek has this to say in their article, Smart Move or Silly Money 2.0?

WHO'S NEXT? Now, the question is whether YouTube's valuation will extend to up-and-coming buyout contenders. So far, it looks like only a few sites have demonstrated growth and engagement with users that might command similar prices. Exhibit A: Facebook, whose value as determined by its venture investors has jumped from $100 million in its first round in September, 2005, to $500 million in a second round last April. And that's just the start. Sources say bidders such as Yahoo are willing to pay up to $1 billion today.

So was Google's buy of YouTube smart or silly? Just as the BusinessWeek article discusses in their own article, the answer to that question is anybody's guess. I think if Google bought YouTube only for its young fickle audience and the level of synergy currently present at the site...it was a silly move. However, Google may have also bought YouTube before anybody else could which is likely a very smart move.

A few months ago I came across Alexa Web Search for the very first time. Alexa not only offers the usual search engine features, but also additional site statistics dealing with traffic ranking. Naturally, I entered my own site into the rankings to see what I could find. Considering my site has been around for only six months I was impressed that I had a traffic rank under 300,000.

Considering that there are nearly 50 million sites presently on the Internet, a site ranking under half a million is pretty good in my book. I had heard that sites using the Drupal content management system ranked well with the various search engines so I was pleased I chose Drupal for my site. All and all, those first few moments visiting Alexa were spent patting myself on the back for a job well done.

Then to my surprise I noticed that although I had typed in cmsreport.com, Alexa displayed uly.net. Uly.net was a domain I had never heard of before visiting Alexa.com. Worse, it appears that uly.net may have been benefiting from the traffic my site receives.

Traffic Rank for uly.net: 218,200

Where do people go on uly.net?

cmsreport.com - 98%

Now some of you might be asking yourself, why do I really care how my site is ranked? I'd like to say, it really doesn't matter to me either since I do run this site for "fun". But, I have an ego. I do get a sense of pride for finally having a site where people actually show up and visit. Put it this way, when you host sites that rank above 2 million you feel somewhat rewarded to finally have a site with only six digits in its rank. More importantly, there is benefit to understanding how traffic rankings from sites such as Alexa, Google, and Technorati are being utilized.

Bryan Ruby's Blog

Stay tuned with us

Monthly archive

Pagination

About

We're a niche website on steroids! Formerly known as CMS Report, we are now socPub. After 10 years obsessing over content, we decided it was time to broaden our horizons with additional topics. We cover a number of topics including content management, marketing strategy, information technology, social media, and consumer technology.